In an interview with Newsmax today, Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist accused religious groups that support immigration reform and the humanitarian treatment of children at the southern border of being “non-violent cartels” who are aiding “the 21st century slave trade” and contributing to a “covert invasion” of the United States.

Gilchrist claimed that “criminal cartels and non-criminal cartels, the do-gooders and people who want to save everybody in the world on both sides of the border” are using child migrants as “human shields, not in the sense of warfare but in the sense of ideological warfare between foreign countries and the government of the United States, the people of the United States.”

When host John Bachman asked Gilchrist what he meant by “non-criminal cartels,” Gilchrist replied, “I would say the religious orders, and it’s not only the Catholic Church, and there are the Protestant church or whatever, it’s several religious orders, it’s several individuals who have banded together to allow this to happen, who want this to happen, for either religious reasons or political reasons or ideological reasons.”

Gilchrist is currently attempting to recruit thousands of volunteer militia members to patrol the southern border in a project he’s modestly calling “Operation Normandy,” a mission that Newsmax helped him to promote at the end of the interview.